Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 9.djvu/224

 214 FINE ARTS M. Taine and the doctrine of phy sical and social causes. Speak ing and shaping groups have no common history. employed with results perhaps less really luminous than they are certainly showy and attractive, is that supplied by a distinguished French writer, M. Taine. M. Taine s philo sophy, which might perhaps be better called a natural history, of fine art, consists in regarding the fine arts as the necessary result of the general conditions under which they are at any time produced conditions of race, conditions of climate, conditions of religion, civilization, and manners. Acquaint yourself with these conditions as they existed in any given people at any given period, and you will be able to account for the characters assumed by the arts of that people at that period and to reason from one to the other, as a botanist can account for the flora of any given locality and can reason from its soil, exposure, and temperature, to the orders of vegetation which it will produce. This method of treating the history of the fine arts, again, is one which can be pursued with profit, in so far as it makes the student realize the connexion of fine art with human culture in general, and teaches him how the arts of any age and country are not an independent or arbitrary phenomenon, but are essentially an outcome, or efflorescence, to use a phrase of Professor Ruskin s, of many deep-seated elements in the civilization which produces them. But it is a method which, rashly used, is very apt to lead to a hasty and one sided handling both of history and of art. It is easy to fasten on certain obvious relations of fine art to general civilization when you know a few of the facts of both, and to say, the cloudy skies and mongrel industrial population of Amster dam at such and such a date had their inevitable reflexion in the art of Rembrandt ; the wealth and pomp of the full- fleshed burghers and burgesses of Antwerp had theirs in the art of Rubens. But to do this in the precise and conclusive manner of M. Taine s treatises on the philosophy of art always means to ignore a large range of conditions or causes for which no corresponding effect is on the surface apparent, and generally, also, a large number of effects for which appropriate causes cannot easily be discovered either. The truth is, that this particular efflorescence of human culture depends for its character at any given time upon combina tions of causes which are by no means simple, but generally highly complex, obscure, and nicely balanced. For instance, the student who should try to reason back from the holy and beatified character which prevails in much of the devo tional painting of the Italian schools down to the Renais sance would make a great mistake if he were to conclude, &quot; like art, like life, thoughts, and manners.&quot; He would not understand the relation of the art to the general civilization of those days, unless he were to remember that one of the chief functions of the imagination is to make up for the shortcomings of reality, and to supply to contemplation images of that which is most lacking in actual life ; so that the visions at once peaceful and ardent of the religious schools of the Italian cities are to be explained, not by the peace, but rather in great part by the dispeace, of contemporary existence. Either of the) three modes of generalization to which we have referred might no doubt yield, however, supposing in the student the due gifts of patience and of caution, a working clue to guide him through that immense region of research, the history of the fine arts. But it is hardly pos sible to pursue to any purpose the history of the two great groups, the shaping group and the speaking group, together. Words are a means of expression which men have generally mastered more quickly than any other ; and in Greece all three divisions of the art of poetry, the narrative, lyric, andl dramatic, had been perfected, and two of them had again declined, before sculpture reached maturity, or painting had passed beyond the stage of its early severity. Again, many nations have been great in poetry at a time when their other fine arts flourished humbly if at all as England in the days of Elizabeth. The history of poetry must thus of necessity be a separate study. And so must the history of music. Music in its independent development is an inven tion, whether made, as some think, in response to the special needs of modern souls, or, as others hold, simply like other inventions in the progress of human ingenuity but at any rate an invention of the last two hundred years. On the other hand, it is very possible to take the whole Main of the shaping group of fine arts together, and to pursue periods connectedly the history, throughout the course of civiliza- &quot; tion, of architecture, sculpture, and painting, and of O f s ] ia p. their mutual relations with one another. Being all arts ing of manual dexterity, and all occupied in providing for group. our delight objects intended for visual contemplation in space, these have a natural and practical affinity. Leaving aside the arts of the races of Egypt and the East, which, profoundly interesting as they are, have had no direct effect upon ourselves except in so far as they communi cated the first hints or germs of inspiration to the ancestors and masters of Western civilization, the Greeks,- leaving those aside, the history of the manual arts of architecture, painting, and sculpture, falls naturally into four great periods or divisions : (1) the Greek and Roman period, from about 700 B.C. to the final triumph of Christianity, say 400 B.C. ; (2) the Christian period, from the triumph of Christianity to about J260 A.D. in Italy and about 1460 in northern Europe ; (3) the Renaissance period, from the above dates till about 1620 A.D ; (4) the modern period, from about 1620 to our own day. We have not set down, as is usually done, a specifically Gothic age in art, for this reason. The characteristic of the whole Christian period is that its dominant art is architecture, chiefly employed in the service of the church, and with the arts of painting and carving only applied subordinately for its enrichment. It makes no essential difference to this fundamental character that from the 5th to the 12th century the forms of this art were derived in the east of Europe from the Byzantine branch, and in the west from the branch usually called Romanesque, of the round-arched architecture of the empire ; and that by the 13th century a new form of architecture, in which the round arch was replaced by the pointed, and the decorations took another character, had been invented in France, and from thence spread abroad to Germany, Eng land, Spain, and last to Italy. The essential difference only begins when the imitative arts, sculpture and painting, begin to develop and detach themselves, to exist and strive after perfection on their own account. This happens in Italy with the artificers of the 13th and 14th centuries, with Niccola Pisano and Giotto; and it happens, though the respective arts are still wholly engaged upon ecclesiastical subjects, in connexion with an incipient study of and passion for antique models. From this time and onward, that movement of men s minds which gradually enthroned the images of pagan antiquity beside those of Christian worship as the ideal theme of art, continued until, in the 15th century, it communicated itself to the more pious races of the North, and until in Italy reached its culmina tion in the genius of Michelangelo and of Raphael. The same movement of the arts held on, with its energy ex hausted and its inspiration flagging, until, soon after the beginning of the 17th century, the Dutch school of common life appeared and announced the greatest revolution of all. This is a revolution which has its counterpart in literature too, and which proceeds from a modern manner of regarding life totally different from that of either antiquity, the Chris tian Middle Age, or the Renaissance. By it the fine arts were brought down from the exclusive regions of the religious and the classical ideal, and launched upon their human, their secular, their democratic, their realistic career, of which who shall as yet foretell the issue? (s. c.)